At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

The Tragic Fate of Kristen Huggins: The Case that Al Sharpton Ignored When He Came to Trenton, NJ

Whatever respectability Al Sharpton is thought to have achieved in recent years, some of us know all too well that he is the same demagogic agent of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) that he has always been.

Some instances of Sharpton’s, and the Industry’s, glaring racial double standards are less well known than others.

A little more than 20 years ago, with an army of camerapersons in tow, Sharpton descended upon my hometown of Trenton, New Jersey to weigh in on a “police brutality” case. Both the officer and civilian in question were black, but this didn’t prevent “Reverend Al” from making a racial issue out of the incident.

The officer was eventually acquitted by a jury. But by this time, Sharpton was long gone.

Interestingly, however unsurprisingly, at about the same time, Trenton was engulfed by a real racially-oriented crime that neither Sharpton nor any of his fellow agents ever thought to acknowledge. Only this time, the perpetrators were black and the victim white.

On the morning of December 17, 1992, Kristen Huggins, a 22 year-old Temple University graduate and artist, drove into Trenton from her suburban home to paint a mural at a private club. While in the parking lot, she was greeted by 39 year-old Ambrose Harris. Harris, who was on his bicycle, was in search of a car that he could use in a robbery. Huggins’ Toyota MR2 caught his eye.

Without further ado, he held her up at gunpoint and ordered her into the trunk of her tiny compact vehicle. Waiting for him at the end of the driveway was his accomplice, 29 year-old Gloria Dunn. With Huggins stuffed in her trunk, terrified, Harris and Dunn drove around the city for a bit before they returned to the scene of the kidnapping where Harris retrieved and hid his bike.

Harris and Dunn then drove Huggins to a wooded area under a city overpass. Harris ordered her from her trunk. He told her to take her off her clothes. According to Dunn, Huggins “didn’t take her clothes off. She was nervous and shaking and said, ‘What are you going to do?’” Harris, Dunn continued, told her to “shut up” and called her a “bitch.” Kristen [Huggins] “said she was a virgin and had never had sex before.” But Harris “didn’t care. He grabbed her and she started trying to take her clothes off. She pushed her sweats down to her knees.”

Harris then proceeded to sodomize his captive as she cried in pain and pleaded with him to stop. When he finished, he told her once more to shut up and ordered her back into her trunk. Then Harris grabbed his gun and asked Dunn if she wanted to “watch” as he killed Huggins. Dunn said that she was only helping Huggins out of the trunk as Harris had commanded when he shot his victim in the back of the head.

Dunn testified that Huggins’ head, wrist, and leg were thrashing. Harris put an old mattress over her body and tried to wash her blood off of the ground with water from a puddle that he scooped into an empty beer bottle. The criminals left for Harris’s home and then returned to the location of the rape and murder with a couple of shovels with which to dig Huggins’ grave. But to make sure that she was dead, Harris shot Huggins one more time in the face.

Harris, who had spent the previous 16 years in prison and who was in police custody as a suspect in four other rapes committed over a four month period when they suspected him of having murdered Huggins, kept silent for two months as police searched for Huggins’ body. It was Dunn and her sister who lead them to it.

Yet the reader would be gravely mistaken to think that it was any sense of civic responsibility or guilt that motivated them. By this point, a $25,000 reward had been issued for anyone who could aid in locating Huggins. Dunn and her sister concocted a story according to which the latter was a psychic whose occult powers informed her as to the whereabouts of the fallen artist.

Harris is vermin among vermin. Yet he also hated whites. Dunn admitted that before he knew for certain the racial identity of the driver of the Toyota MR2 on which he set his sights, he told her that if the driver was black, he would only “tie” him up. But if the driver was white, then he would kill him (or her).

During his trial, Harris spit on the courtroom floor, grabbed his crotch, flipped off Huggins’ grieving parents and told the court that they owed him an apology.

Police representatives had complained that during all of this, many bystanders in the black neighborhood from which Huggins was taken knew what was happening to her and yet refused to volunteer any information.

Sharpton never returned to Trenton again that year. Neither he nor any of his fellow demagogues in the Racism-Industrial-Complex ever uttered a peep about this outrage, a crime so horrid and so sensational that it most certainly would’ve achieved national notoriety had the races of the perpetrators and their silent abettors, on the hand, been reversed with the race of the victim, on the other.

But this is exactly what we should expect from Al Sharpton and his Industry.

Disgusting that people knew what happened & didn’t say a WORD! It shouldn’t matter what race. She was a victim, someone’s friend, someone’s daughter! Rev. Al – racist! He should be ashamed of himself.
May Harris rot in hell and becomes someone’s “bitch” in prison. For Dunn, you also, may rot in hell! You as a woman should of tried to help another woman in crisis.
We are all Gods children, black, white, yellow, purple. We should protect/help others in crisis. Should not matter what race a person is. Evil comes in all colors & shapes. Again, so called Rev. Al should be ashamed of his self. Your a sorry excuse for a man of god. You call yourself an activist for civil rights, you need to check yourself, my brother! I say Amen!
May Kristin rest in peace.

Previous Posts

Forgetting Malcolm XThis year isn’t just the golden anniversary of Selma. It is as well marks the 50th anniversary of the murder of Malcolm X.
Malcolm X has been mythologized. According to the myth, there are, essentially, two Malcolms: the “pre-Mecca” Malcolm and the “post-Mecca” Malcolm X. The former, a

Ben Carson: "Progressive" on Homosexuality?Ben Carson got himself into some trouble a couple of weeks back for remarks concerning homosexuality that he made during an exchange with CNN’s Chris Cuomo.
However, I’m not sure what exactly it is that Carson said that ignited such controversy—or any controversy.
Carson expressed his po

The "Existential Crisis" of the Islamic World's ChristiansIn spite of what Barack Obama would have us believe, he was as much in tune to Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress this week as was anyone and everyone else in the world. But exclusive focus on American/Israeli and Israeli/Islamic relations threatens to blind us to the fierce, unrelenting o

Advertisement

At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

by Jack Kerwick

Regardless of one's views on religion, there is no escaping the fact that Western civilization is unintelligible in the absence of it -- of Christianity specifically. Indeed, even the secular ideologies of our generation derive their identity from the Christianity to which they are opposed. Culture and religion intersect in numerous ways. Through this blog, I explore the intricate relationship between them.